Featured Book: The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross (continued)

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Mr. Ross writes in Chapter 12, "'Grimes! Grimes!'": "Shostakovich's letters indicate that the dedication 'to victims of fascism and war' was something of a cover for his own private anguish. To Glikman he wrote: 'The title page could carry the dedication: "To the memory of the composer of this quartet" … It is a pseudo-tragic quartet.' … The personal motto D S C H, which sounded pseudo-triumphantly in the finale of the Tenth Symphony, is woven into almost every page of the Eighth Quartet. It appears alongside quotations from previous Shostakovich works, including the Tenth Symphony, Lady Macbeth, and the youthful First Symphony, not to mention Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, Siegfried's Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, and the revolutionary song 'Tormented by Grievous Bondage.' Was Shostakovich speaking ironically when he described the quartet as an exercise in 'self-glorification'? The designation might apply to the ending of the Tenth, but it seems inappropriate for the Eighth Quartet, which trails off into a black, static chorale of lamentation" (p. 437).